Materials

The other day I found some old fence posts used for a tractor shed in the yard to make a door and door frame.
Most of the materials I've used are found around the back yard from old fences. The only building materials purchased for the root cellar so far were thesesand bags, which (excluding beer) puts the cost of the root cellar at $33.00. Not bad. Actually, I've replaced a pick handle or 2 and a wheel barrel wheel, but that doesn't count because I use it for the garden anyway. The only tools I've used are a shovel, a 15lb breaker bar, a pick mattock, and a 5 gallon paint bucket. I imagine a bobcat could have done much of the work in a weekend which took me hundreds of hours, but I think digging by hand gave me a good sense of what a job like this one would have taken before motors.
Digging in central Texas is quite challenging because there is only between 1-2 feet of topsoil. After that is solid limestone bedrock. Needless to say, the breaker bar has had quite the workout. The advantage to this geology is that the walls of the root cellar are very solid and wont collapse or erode. Also, much of the rock removed from the hole was used in the rock wall and as riprap and to fill the sand bags. When the sand bags are filled with limestone dirt and then wet, it binds and makes a pretty solid hard rocky clay. Which is doubly good considering how sensitive these bags are to UV damage. A week of sun exposure will make the bags very brittle.

Some Photos

Below are a couple of photos from around my root cellar.

Some of my attempt at dry stone masonry from the side. Its actually pretty sturdy. That rock wall is about 4 feet tall. My hope is to have some grass growing on top, if it ever rains here!

The entrance seen from above. Its not the most elegant looking thing, but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with it. 

Some of the roof beams. Ash Juniper, some 2x4 and fence posts, a stop sign, with drop cloth and sand bags on top. 

More to come. It actually started raining outside so I couldn't take as many photos.

An intro to my root cellar

Around 2 years ago I became obsessed with root cellars. I found what i thought was a gardening and canning book at a flea market. It was about gardening and canning but more interesting were diagrams of the spaces people had designed to keep their harvest. Until this point I had hardly given a second thought to how people had kept all sorts of food without refrigeration. In the back of my mind in history class I thought of food preservation in terms of my modern diet as well. It just blew my mind to think about how many people used to keep their food this way, and that I could possibly do it. So I dove right in.
Unfortunately  I don't have any photos from the beginning of my work on my root cellar. It never occurred to me to document my progress because frankly I was a little embarrassed. After all, who would spend so much time just digging a hole in the ground?